Boredom - Alberto Moravia [13]
“You mean your interests.”
“The family interests. And then, I didn’t like his way of traveling. I like to travel with every sort of convenience. To go to places where there are good hotels, and people that I know. For instance to Paris, London, Vienna. But he would have dragged me off to goodness knows where, Afghanistan or Bolivia. I can’t bear discomfort and I can’t bear out-of-the-way countries.”
“But tell me,” I persisted, “why did he run away from home, or why, as you say, did he travel? Why didn’t he stay with you?”
“Because he didn’t like staying at home.”
“And why didn’t he like staying at home? Was he bored?”
“I never took the trouble to find out. I only know that he used to become gloomy, and never say anything, and never go out. In the end it was I who gave him the money and said to him: ‘Here you are, go away, it’s better for you to go.’”
“Don’t you think that if he had loved you he would have stayed?”
“Yes, exactly,” she answered in a disagreeable voice that seemed to take pleasure in telling the truth, “but he didn’t love me.”
“Then why did he marry you?”
“It was I who wanted to marry him. He, perhaps, wouldn’t have done it.”
“He was poor, wasn’t he? And you were rich?”
“Yes, he had nothing at all. He came of a good family. But that was all.”
“Don’t you think he might have wanted to marry for money?”
“Oh, no. Your father wasn’t mercenary. In that respect he was like you. It’s true that he was always in need of money, but he didn’t attach any importance to money.”
“Do you know why I’m asking you all these questions about my father?”
“No, indeed I don’t.”
“It’s because it occurred to me that, in one respect anyhow, I’m like him. I’m always running away from you.”
She stooped down and, with a little pair of scissors that I hadn’t noticed before, neatly cut off a red flower. Then she straightened up again and asked: “How is your work going?”
At this question I was suddenly conscious of a tightening of the throat and of a feeling of gray, icy desolation spreading all around me, issuing from me in steadily widening waves, as happens in nature when a cloud comes between the sun and the earth. In a voice that in spite of myself sounded strangled, I replied: “I’m not painting any more.”
“What do you mean, you’re not painting any more?”
“I’ve decided to give up painting.”
My mother had never been in sympathy with my painting. In the first place because she understood nothing about it but disliked admitting this or hearing it said to her, and also because, not unjustly, she thought it had been my painting which had taken me away from her. But once again I was forced to admire her power of self-control. Anyone else in her place would at least have shown some satisfaction. She, however, received the news with indifference. “And why,” she inquired after a moment, in a tone of polite, idle, almost mundane curiosity, “why have you decided to give up painting?”
By this time we had almost reached the villa, and there was a smell of cooking, of very good cooking, in the air. At the same time I felt that my despair, instead of lessening, was increasing, though I kept repeating furiously to myself: “It’s getting better now, it’s getting better now.” And then a recollection rose to the surface of my mind, a memory of myself as a child of five, with my knee bleeding, sobbing despairingly as I came up through another garden and ran toward my mother, into whose arms I threw myself impetuously; and of my mother bending over me and saying to me in her ugly, croaking voice: “Now, now, don’t cry, let me look at it, don’t cry, don’t you know that men don’t cry?” And now I looked at my mother and it seemed to me that, for the first time after a long period, I had a feeling of affection for her. Then, in answer to her question, I said: “Don’t know,” speaking as briefly as possible, for I was ashamed of my despair and did not wish her to be aware of it.
But I realized at once that it was no use saying “Don’t know”; the feeling of desolation did not cease on that account; it made my flesh creep and my